I was put in charge (meaning, I got to do all the paperwork for) a program that garnered large sums of money from various corporate entities and then distributed the money to promising young faculty and graduate students for various research projects. Moments after being put in charge, one such young faculty member showed up in my office.

“I understand you are in charge of the JCAP.”

“Yes, I guess I am, what can I do for you?”

“I need $10,000 to do a project. We’re going to look into buying and selling the right to release Carbon dioxide into the environment by big industry. You know, using market forces to help the environment. We’re working with Senator X in Washington, he wants to draft a bill, we’re helping him.”

“Sounds great, the check is in the mail!”

And that, to my knowledge, was the beginning of the whole Carbon Tax and Trade thingie, which as you probably know, has more or less failed in its recent incarnation in Washington. The Senator in question was a Republican … yes, using market forces to save the environment was a conservative, Republican idea at the time, though these days the Republicans seem to hate it. And it is still probably a good idea, dammit. Maybe its century has yet to come.

There is a paper you need to know about. It is written by the esteemed political scientist Theda Skocpol, at Harvard University, and it is called “Naming the problem: What it will take to counter extremism and engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming.” Click here to download a working draft.

Skocpol’s paper is excellent, but it might be quicker to read a piece in The Guardian by Susanne Goldenberg. Goldenberg notes that Skocpol

…has put the blame squarely for America’s failure to act on climate change on environmental groups. She also argues that there is little prospect Barack Obama will put climate change on the top of his agenda in his second term.

Skocpol in effect accuses the DC-based environmental groups of political malpractice, saying they were blind to extreme Republican opposition to their efforts.

Environmental groups overlooked growing opposition to environmental protections among conservatives voters and, underestimated the rising force of the Tea Party, believing – wrongly, as it turned out – they could still somehow win over Republican members of Congress through “insider grand bargaining”.

That fatal misreading of the political realities – namely, the extreme polarisation of Congress and the Tea Party’s growing influence among elected officials – doomed the effort to get a climate law through Congress. It will also make it more difficult to achieve climate action in the future, she added.

Inside lobbying failed, and grassroots organizing won. So, the side that used the inside lobbying – the environmental groups – needs to rethink their strategy. The Tea Party, which for unknown reasons is against the environment (I mean, really, who would be against The Earth?) has got their strategy down, and doesn’t need to make much of an adjustment.

Many of us have understood for a couple of years now that there is no compromise in the Republican party. That Environmental lobbyists did not realize this is disconcerting. Recently elected Republicans have told their non-Republican constituents that they are not interested in hearing their opinions, and in some cases have openly admitted that they only represent those that voted for them. Moderate Republicans have been replaced by extremists in most of the Congressional districts they once represented. Extreme Republicans representing districts with a mixed constituency have replaced public talks, town meetings, and the like with highly scripted and restricted things that look like public fora but are not, or with highly moderated internet events. With respect to the environment, the majority of Americans think one thing, the Right Wing does another.

And when I said above that the Tea Party is opposed to environmental sense for no apparent reason, you must have noticed that I was being cynical. The average Tea Party member is opposed to environmentally responsible legislation because they are told to be opposed to it by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And Rush and Fox are supporting ultra-wealthy corporate interests. These are the same ultra-wealthy corporate interests that picked Mitt Romney to be the Republican Nominee at some point during last year’s primary process, and paid for his makeover from technocrat to social, environmental, and political extremist.

There are lessons. We must learn them.

Lesson one is that well organized grassroots movements work. They work better than unorganized grassroots movements, they work better than inside baseball (on its own), and they work better than their reputation.

Lesson two is that the Tea Party, a successful grassroots movement, works well in part because its grassroots members are willing to think, say, and act in concert with the plan, whatever that plan may be. I don’t suggest that the Progressive Movement or environmentalists develop an army of zombies, but I do suggest that a certain amount of “getting with the program” is a good idea.

Lesson three is that the Tea Party is strong and effective, and the corporate sponsors of that extremist movement are getting what they want, because they have powerful tools like Rush Limbaugh and FOX News running herd. We have Al Gore. I love Al Gore. But he is not Rush Limbaugh. Which is a good thing. But still. I think you can see my point.

Lesson four is a sad emerging reality: Nobody will care about Sandy, the droughts, the fires, or any of it unless FOX News and Rush Limbaugh verify that these things are real and important. Perhaps the coming Bacon Shortage will turn a few heads. This, of course, relates back to Lesson three.

Lesson five, and if you ever had a conversation with a Communist for more than a half hour you heard this from them, and ironically, it is a truth that is being exploited by the Right Wing: inside trading always becomes mere trading and that always becomes the hobgoblin of the state and corporate interests that the inside trading may have initially sought to change. Compromise means the corporate interests win. Compromise means the status quo wins. The reason old school dyed-in-the-wool communists like to point this out is that the obvious solution is a pervasive, complete, and if necessary violent revolution. The problem with that, of course, is that you are more likely than not to end up with Stalin. That is not good for the environment and is probably bad for a number of other reasons.

But since we are talking about collective action and such, we can bring in Lesson Six. Lesson six is that one of the most powerful political forces in this country (and a few other countries as well) is being left out of this conversation, but is perhaps the best ally environmentalists can develop. Unions are losing power, and it is not a coincidence that their struggle is against political entities bought and paid for by ultra-rich corporate interests and individuals. Unions stand the most to gain from a new Green Economy. Unions can be rebuilt on the backs of our current crisis, and our economy can be rebuilt on the backs of the Unions, if everybody would just get a stronger back and start doing the heavy political lifting we need to do. In the meantime, we save the planet.

Lesson seven, then, is that Unions have been too long in bed with social conservatives and other right wing causes. The Union shows up to endorse the Democrat, but the union member all too often exercises his or her right to vote against the interests of that same Union. Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority were the hard hats and other Union rank and file, and that hasn’t changed much. What we need now is more of a recognition of Silent Spring by that Silent Majority. The Unions have to get on board with the environmental movement, and visa versa. The next round of Progressive candidates to run for the US House have to be endorsed by Bill McKibbens’s 350.org and by the AFL-CIO. Strongly, honestly, and in the voting booth and not just the pocket book.

Can we get organized, people?

UPDATE: One could see this all as a matter of blaming the environmental group. But that would be wrong. In fact, it is the corporate interests, wealthy, their stooge, the science denialists who deserve 100% of the blame. Also, the American People for their irresponsible voting habits deserve some of the blame. And, poor strategy on the part of environmental groups. And maybe the grassroots too, for not being active enough. There is plenty of blame to go around, and yes, it does add up to about 200% or more! An important perspective on this is this post by Joe Romm: What Theda Skocpol Gets Wrong About The Climate Bill Fight

Related: Beyond baby steps: Analyzing the cap-and-trade flop by Bill McKibben.

Fifty five of us jammed in a bus designed to hold fourty people plus a driver, rolling down Highway 90 from Upstate New York to Chicago. As a teenager (just turned 15), I was thrilled to be going to Chicago to attend the Fight Back Conference, a thinly disguised Communist Party meeting. I was going, in part for Keith, the young African American kid (about 12 years old) who was shot in the back by a state trooper just under a year earlier. Keith was driving a mo-ped down the toll road, on the shoulder, where he shouldn’t have been. It appears that he did not notice the trooper pull over behind him, so he just kept driving off. Or maybe he was trying to escape. If memory serves, he was the first human to be shot and killed with one of the brand new Magnum sidearms that the troopers fought so hard to arm themselves with, to replace the old .38’s typical in those days for police officers. He was shot square in the back.

I was also doing it because I wanted to understand the subtleties of the socialism vs. communism argument that I was hearing at the Fight Back meetings. There were communists and socialists on the bus, and as far as I could tell, it was mainly a difference in ethnicity. Not ethnicity of the activists, but rather, of the spies that followed them around, taking the occasional picture, and making the occasional notes. East Asians were following the communists, the Socialists were being tailed by Caucasians. That was the Taiwanese secret police vs. “ours.” (the FBI, the SIS, and so on).

OK, so maybe it’s true that I was also doing it for the chicks. Mickey, our organizer, was cool and cute, and so were the two girls I was crammed into the seat on that bus with.

Seventeen hours including a breakdown near Gary, Indiana. Those were the days. The days when you could smell Gary 50 miles or more away.

Fightback ended up being the unions, various political organizations, some political parties, organized into a large conference to specifically address the issue of the increasing number of people being shot dead by the cops. They were being shot in the street for being black. They were shot because they were involved in protests or demonstrations. Mostly, they were being shot because they were engaged with activities protected by The Constitution but that the establishment, still largely entrenched despite the upheavals that arose from the social conflict of Viet Nam and astounding events such as the Kent State Massacre and Attica found annoying.

The conference may have had little effect in and of itself. But you’ve gotta admit: It is no longer normal for the police to shoot folks without a good reason, and ensuing investigation, and hopefully both and never neither.

Fast forward eons of time. I’m living in Boston now, probably Pre-Graduate School but way post-Revolutionary Commie days.

Ronald Reagan sends the Air Traffic Controllers … the union members on strike … packing. The union is busted. Most American union experts agree: This was the high water mark for our unions. After the ATC union was busted, it was all down hill for organized labor. Later in the same week, if memory serves within about 48 hours, a scab air traffic controller at Logan International Airport decides, against all protocols, that he can land one more plane on the notoriously short snow and ice covered runway, during one of the region’s famous “nor’easters” (well, made famous later on because the “Perfect Strom” was such a nor’easter).

The plane rolled off the runway and partway into the harbor. It was not until an hour or two after offloading the passengers and fishing the dead bodies of the flight crew out of their watery grave that rescue workers and airport officials noticed that a boy and his dad … and the seats they were sitting in … were gone. Gone into the murky harbor to never be seen again.

(Over the next few years, every time anyone found a floater in the harbor people perked up figuring maybe it was one of them. But it never was. It was like they never existed. A lot of people have gone that way in this particular body of water. Some people say it’s the currents. Others say it’s the curse of this or that pirate. I’m keeping my opinions to myself on this one.)

Anyway, fast forward just a year or two. I’m a teaching fellow for a big intro course. A student comes to see me to beg for getting out of the upcoming midterm. Of course, I’m prepared to explain why that is never going to happen, but she gives me an argument I could not refuse. She was going off with friends to a major protest regarding women’s reproductive rights in DC. I told her that I appreciated her service and excused her from the exam. But in the conversation that ensued, I got, frankly, a little pissed off at her.

She told me that “these days” (this would have been the mid 1980s) “we” (meaning she and her friends) have learned to carry out these protests in a different way than “They” (meaning my older sisters, for example) did in the old days. It was wrong to let protests become violent, wrong to burn the flag, wrong to protest without a permit, and so on and so forth. These days, the protesters have learned to do this in a much more peaceful way. Dialog was the key.

This girl obviously never tried to have a dialog with Richard Nixon or Alexander Haig.

Of course, she was correct that protests “these days” (back then) are typically more peaceful than they had been back in the bad old days. It had been a long time since the National Guard opened fire on a group of students and passers-by, as they did at Kent State, or since protesters’ headquarters were firebombed with the protesters inside, or since the families of on-strike miners were massacred in the very holes they had dug to be their “homes” or protesting vets gunned down in Washington DC, probably on the very ground she would be visiting for her nice neat little affair of dialog. And so on.

It may not be a perfect relationship, but there seems to be a pretty good link between time passing and the degree to which civil protest can happen peacefully. Union busting in those days was not done by Presidential Order. It was done by busting heads. Killing people and tossing their bodies in swamps. The civil rights movement was not a civil dialog welcomed by the reigning political parties. It was illegal. People protesting for civil rights were set on by fire hoses. In those days police dogs were not for sniffing out drugs or illegal fruit. They were for attacking protesting black people. No kidding.

Every decade that has gone by since the early union struggles, the WW I Veterans issues, civil rights, the Viet Nam War, has seen it become more and more normal for disagreement through discourse and less and less normal for people standing in a public place with protest signs to be fired upon with tear gas and occasional live ammunition, hosed, set on by dogs, and generally treated in an oppressive and violent manner. So society has improved in our ability to settle at least some of our differences in a non-violent manner. But at the same time, some of the key bastions of civil power and people’s authority … the unions in particular … are found to be going extinct.

Had it not been for a very long list of dead miners, farm workers, Native Americans, African American civil rights protesters and their non-black comrades, and peace activists, the girl going to Washington would not be able to be so smug about her command of the peaceful process, and there would be nobody walking around on the internet calling themselves “Bi-Liberal” and getting away with it for very long.

So I just had to laugh when I read Chris Mooney’s very serious post linking the current writers strike and the broader issue of writers in general, including bloggers. I laughed cynically because Chris was being taken to task for being too middle class and too soft around the edges, blogging as a hobby, not being sufficiently downtrodden, by a commenter who I’m sure meant well but who also reminded me of that student who was so naive about the nature of civil protest, the young woman who wanted dialog but no conflict.

Chris is right to bring the writers strike into a broader context. We are seeing what looks like, but hopefully is not really, the waning days of worker protection. Today we live in a world where far fewer people are working in mines, farm workers have significant political representation, and while there may be a lot of crappy jobs, those jobs don’t usually come with the cost of life and limb, like was true in Lowell and Lawrence in the garment factories. We live in a world where we have a “working poor” who are truly poor and deserve better, but who generally do not have to eat road kill and drink hand gathered chicory to have a decent meal. But this means that it is also a world where the young can forget, or more likely never even know about, the struggles of those who came before them. (And if they forget or do not know, it is not their fault. It is the fault of the elders, whose responsibility it is to pass on the stories!) This is a world in which the unions could so easily dry up and blow away.

When I was a kid, there was one TV for every three or four houses on the block. Now, there’s three or four TV’s per house in most neighborhoods. Dag nabbit, back in my day, we had to walk to school, up hill in both directions, through ten foot snow drifts. Today high school kids drive themselves to school.

At the Fight Back Conference, I saw presentation after presentation … people representing a dozen urban cores and about half the states in the Union … about those who had died at the hands of The Man over the previous year. Today, we watch “Cops” (the show with the catchy Reggae tune), which is clearly to get us used to the idea that cops are tough, and should be.

One of our unions here at Moo University went on strike a few months back. The faculty were truly titillated, having the opportunity to involve themselves with local, readily available, no risk political action to “support” the very secretaries and clerical workers that they treat like something the cat dragged in during the rest of the year, when they are not on strike. The U held firm. The workers would be given nothing. Finally, a group of students initiated a hunger strike. I protested that. I insisted that the faculty go on a hunger strike before dragging these students into this mess. I’m not sure if the hunger strike is what did it, but within about 48 hours, if memory serves, of the last meals taken by those students, the union caved and the secretaries and clerical workers ended the strike with nothing but a couple weeks lost pay to show for it.

The end is near, don’t you think?

A repost from November 2007.